Newsletter Excerpt, April 23, 2020 -- "The $15 Challenge"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $49.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

"The last 15 years, in which the question of whether Clemens did sports drugs during that limited period of time in which we decided to care about such things has kept him out of the Hall of Fame, have served to cloud the memory of how incredible he was for two decades. Clemens, like Barry Bonds, wasn’t particularly cuddly, and like Bonds he has some serious off-field markers against his character. On the field, though, he was the best pitcher who anyone alive has ever seen."

Newsletter Excerpt, April 21, 2020 -- "The Inside Game"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $49.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

"I enjoyed Keith’s first book, Smart Baseball, but my main problem with it was that there wasn’t enough Keith Law in the book. I’ve known Keith for two decades, and he’s a very funny writer with a sharp wit, wit that he largely set aside to present the ideas in Smart Baseball. In The Inside Game, Law throws more fastballs, and he throws more curves, making his points with generous dollops of the humor and even snark that have been big parts of his repertoire for decades."

Newsletter Excerpt, April 15, 2020 -- "Mike Trout versus Ken Griffey Jr."

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $49.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

"Mike Trout has nearly a 40-point edge in OBP, which drives his overall edge. Trout is also much better on the bases. With 200 steals at an 85% clip, he’s one of the best basestealers of his era. Griffey Jr. stole 123 bases in his first nine years at a 71% success rate. Put simply, Trout is a much better offensive force, through age 27, than Griffey Jr. was."

Newsletter Excerpt, April 9, 2020 -- "Louie Loosens the Jar"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $49.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

"Seven-inning games would take 22% of the innings off the table, lowering the workload on pitchers as a whole, pitchers who will be taking on an unusual burden of being ramped up, cooled down, and then ramped up again since the start of the year. It would eliminate the need to carry 15 and 16 pitchers, as some of the plans contemplate. If some percentage of the schedule has to take place in Arizona to account for cities where holding games may be untenable, it lessens the time spent outside in the state’s brutal summer heat.

"The biggest problem with this plan? People might really like it. I’m telling you now that if MLB played a 2020 season with seven-inning games, it would have a very hard time ever going back to nine."

Newsletter Excerpt, April 3, 2020 -- "Mike Minor/Lance Lynn and the Rangers"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $49.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

"So the Rangers didn’t have much choice but to go back to this particular well. They traded for Corey Kluber, then signed Kyle Gibson and Jordan Lyles, filling out the rotation with pitchers who have low ceilings -- yes, even Klubot -- but higher floors. They would almost have to, replacing a group of pitchers who, last year, combined for a 7.22 ERA in 97 starts, averaging barely four innings a start (that includes a handful of openers, but not enough to change the point)."

Newsletter Excerpt, April 1, 2020 -- "The Agreement"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.

Your subscription gets you the newsletter and various related features two to five days a week, more than 150 mailings (more than 200,000 words) a year full of smart, fun baseball writing that you can't find in the mainstream. Subscribers can also access the new Slack workspace, to talk baseball with me and hundreds of other Newsletter subscribers.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for one year for $49.95 using your PayPal account or major credit card.

--

"So that $170 million the teams are paying major leaguers? It’s coming right out of the pockets of high-school seniors and college juniors, a short-term loan from those groups to current MLBPA members. It’s an indefensible wealth transfer for which everyone involved should be ashamed."